Where’s Megan?

I took another train ride up the east coast to a town called Puri (also the name of a delicious fried bread, relation unknown). It’s famous for a huge festival, Rath Yatra, coming up later this month, where enormous chariots are carried through the streets, filled with people. Here’s a shot of the street where you can see the chariots being built towards the back.

(extra credit if you can find the cow in the picture)

Other than that, the town is pretty quiet. The electricity usually went out in the afternoon, so I sat on the beach a lot, enjoying the breeze. Some kids playing cricket:

I took an overnight train to Calcutta (now officially known as Kolkata), which was 4 hours late due to massive flooding in the city. I spent my 4th of July doing this:

and this:

Unfortunately it rained non-stop while I was there, which really limited the sightseeing I could do. I visited a huge Botanical Garden, but just ended up getting completely soaked. I had an umbrella, but the underside seemed to be getting wetter than the top. So I decided to take refuge under something… anything… oh look, the largest tree in India!

This Banyan tree is 450 meters across, which means that if I walked around it I would have traveled nearly a mile (no calculator, so fellow geeks feel free to check my math). The tree really seems more like a forest, because branches grow downward to form thin trunks (2,880 of them). It was kind of creepy, actually, like tentacles.

(Not for the claustro-, tentacle-, or arbor-phobic)

In the spirit of Jerry Springer, some “final thoughts”:

Lessons Learned:

• Always carry toilet paper
• City names are always pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable (I mispronounced everything until I cracked this secret code)
• The only way to find someplace is to ask at least 3 people, take the average, and then keep asking every block.
• “Hotel” means Restaurant, “Finger chips”=french fries, “hot water” means in a bucket. and “No flooding”=up to 12 inches of water on main paths.
• An extreme amount of patience is required for ordinary things like buying a railway ticket. Those that do not pass this important test of patience become taxi drivers.
• Side-to-side head tilt means “OK” or “yes”. I think shaking head still means “no”, but that gesture or word is rarely used.
• Always carry toilet paper

Also, I realize that some of my comments may have sounded complain-y, but it really hasn’t been all bad. India’s just… very different, which makes it both more challenging and more interesting. For example, here are a few things I like about India:

• Every festival, holiday, or wedding calls for huge parades down the street, with incredibly elaborate decorations, a band, the works.
• Where there are garbage bins, a lot of times they’re in the shapes of cute animals like bunnies or penguins. (Although why I would shove my trash into an adorable bunny rather than toss it in the street with the other rubbage, I don’t know.)
• There are tigers. That’s awesome.
• Everywhere, even in poor, remote villages, the women are dressed in beautiful brightly-colored saris. They look complicated to put on, but very cool (both temperature-wise and otherwise).
• Whenever you order soup, you get a bunch of little bowls of condiments to add to it.
• Oh, and the incredible landscape.

Tags: Calcutta, India, Kolkata, Puri, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 5:35 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.